Some vows can never be broken... |
** Image ID #2123362 Unavailable ** It were a tranquil, soothing night when healers came upon their plight: a beastly sick would claim each home in everyone’s beloved Rome. The Plague of 1656 -- an agent of the River Styx -- ensured the weary bodies’ rot; hence curers’ skills were all for naught. Yet frightly masks adorned their heads while treating patients in their beds; then one expired -- two, three four, and Romans dreaded losing more. These were the calm before the storm, they would have traded for a swarm of locusts plaguing field and fleet than rather souls fall at their feet. Some herbal oil filled the mask of every doctor put to task. Subtle lavender begot each long-nosed guise, so moist and hot. They gather ‘round the darkened church, where nary a songbird braves to perch to witness funerals so quick, lest pestilence decide to stick to skin dampened from sweat and haste, they daren’t linger, else they’ll taste elixirs of the Underworld and wrath of hellhounds yet unfurled. “Make way,” they say, to maidens fair whose golden locks flow without care for daily wear has gone awry as denizens pray not to die. Her solemn service underway stops when the platform starts to sway and rumbling whispers turn to shrieks as pools of blood the casket leaks and cries of disbelief abound when body’s feet do touch the ground for whom they thought was seized by death has been returned by Satan’s breath to roam the streets and curse the lives and eat the babes and burn the wives as sinister a deal was made once at her breast the devil laid; they made a pact, a solemn vow: eternity he would endow, if fealty she’d swear him now. Line count: 47 Written for "Invalid Item" Round 24. This piece consists of quatrains following English iambic tetrameter and rhyming scheme aabb, etc. The final quatrain is split, however, into a couplet and a tercet of masculine rhyme. |